Mr. Vance & Pearl Harbor

This is a post from my "diary" that I wrote earlier this year.  It's about a long conversation I had with a man who's known me all my life.  He was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  There are some great insights to his point of view on the day and his life.  ENJOY!


(Written October 21, 2012)
I went into grandma's house to return the grinder I had borrowed to work on the bench.  Grama wasn't home so I assumed she had gone in to the nursing home to visit grampa.  So I put the grinder back in the tractor room and headed back out.  When I came back out into the garage, I noticed a red SUV coming down the road and I just knew it was going to come to the house.  Alas, it did.  A lady got out and said hi and asked if I remembered her.  Hmmm... a sixty-ish year old woman at the lake... could be anybody.  lol.  I told her I didn't and found out she was a camper for many years down there.

Anyway, she pointed up to the top of the road near the gates to the entrance and said, "that's Norman Vance up there."  I looked and saw his minivan at an odd angle and stopped.  My first thought was that he had wrecked into the rocks or gates up there.  Maybe he misjudged the turn a bit.  The man is 91 years old.  It certainly wouldn't be a stretch to think that.  It turned out his vehicle was having fits.  This lady had run in to him in town and followed him home because of his car trouble.

She and I walked up the hill with the plan of pushing it back, getting it straight, putting it in neutral and rolling down the hill.  Well, we got it back to his house and all three of us stood there talking for a short time.  The lady then said she wanted to drive around the property and just see what it's like now as she hadn't been back in a long time.  That left Mr. Vance and I alone.  He started talking and didn't stop for an hour.  It was wonderful.  That's the most I've ever talked to him and was so thankful for the opportunity.  I am hoping I can remember most of what he said and record it here.

He told me he remembers when I was just a baby.  He remembers my dad coming up to him and saying, "I've got something to show you..."  It turned out to be a baby!  It was me.

He told me how he and Mary (his wife who passed away at least 15 years ago) lived down at the lake before grampa and grama bought it.  They were getting ready to move because they didn't care for the property owners.  But when they heard there was going to be a new owner, they decided to stay a while and see how it went.  They really liked living there, so they were happy with grampa and grama as the new owners.  He moved out there when he was 50 years old.

He remembers when he was building his garage and had ordered the concrete to lay the pad for it.  My mom and dad were living in the house just down the gravel road at that time.  Dad saw him out there and came down and said, "I'll help you with that."  And he got right to work on the concrete.  Mr. Vance said he tried to help, but he thinks he might have been in dad's way.  He tried to pay dad for it, but dad refused.  He even tried to get the money to him by giving it to a girl that lived down there and having her take it over to dad.  Dad sent that girl right back to Mr. Vance with his check and told him to keep it.

He told me that one day, when mom and dad and I still lived down there, he remembered seeing me (I had to be less than 3 years old) running down the road and my mom screaming at me and running way behind me.  She was telling me to get back to her.  And I kept yelling back, "I'm gonna go see my grama!"  Mr. Vance said I made it to grama's house before she ever caught up to me.  He said, "I never did find out how that turned out when she got over to your grandma's house."  Sounds like not much has changed over the years.  Mom tells me what to do (or what not to do) and I ignore it.  lol

He told me about all kinds of jobs he had and bands he played in.  Almost all of them involved a guy named Carter.  He was in so many bands.  I have heard him play guitar and know how talented he is.  I had no idea he had such a history of playing in bands like that though.  A couple of jobs that stick out in my mind that he did were managing Carter's paint store and being a milk man.

He told me about how my cousin sold him a picnic table once when she was working at Marsh.  He said she told him all about it and that it was on sale.  She worked hard to convinced him that he should buy it.  He went home and looked at his back porch and realized that she was right.  He really did need that table.  So he went back into town and bought it.

Mr. Vance was in the Navy for six years.  He told me so much about that period in his life.  I hope I can record it fairly accurately.  Some of the stuff he was talking about I didn't fully understand.  Must be Navy stuff.  haha.  He must have really loved that time in his life.  He said he wished he would have stayed in the Navy.  His wife really didn't want him to though.

He told me lots of stories of being ornery with his shipmates.  I'd love to share those stories, but I think I'm going to just move on... ;-)

He said he knew everything there was to know about the Navy.  That's one of the reasons he wished he would've stayed in.  He said he knew those ships inside and out.  He could do just about anything.  Even get a ship into port if he had to.

Once he had talked about the Navy for a bit, I decided to ask the thing I really wanted to ask.  I know he was at Pearl Harbor.  I read a newspaper article once where they had interviewed him about it also, but I really wanted to hear it from him.  So, I asked, "You were at Pearl Harbor too, weren't you?"

He said, "Yes I was.  I didn't like them Japanese that day."

He went on to tell me that his ship was in dry dock at the time.  So when it got started, there were certain big guns that couldn't be used since they were not used for airplanes.  They came around asking for volunteers to go over the side of the ship and do something.  Mr. Vance said they were looking for some "dummies."  He volunteered.  He climbed over the side of the ship, which was a danger because they were in dry dock so there was no water underneath.  If you fell, you were dead.

USS Pennsylvania BB 38 in dry dock.  Pearl Harbor.

He and two other guys went over and climbed down.  It was a fairly narrow area where they had to work.  It sounded like they were bolting something down.  I'm not sure what though.  One guy was a bigger guy and was in the way, so he went back up.  Mr. Vance and the other guy finished the job and began to climb back up.  Things had calmed a bit while they were down there.  But during the climb up, the "Japs" came back and were using machine guns this time.  Mr. Vance was climbing the ladder first and the other guy was below him.  He said they must have seen him and the other guy climbing up the side of the ship because they shot at them and the bullets went under his feet and over the other guy's head.  There were paint chips flying off the ship and onto the other guy's head.  He said that guy was never the same again through the war and even afterward.
He said he never thought that much about the significance of having been at Pearl Harbor until much later.  Then, what he said at the end of the story was the most profound concept and really struck me.  He said, in a very normal conversational tone, "That was one horrible day."

I couldn't help but think, in a 91 year life that has been full of experiences and adventures, something as catastrophic as being present at the bombing of Pearl Harbor was just "one horrible day".  ONE DAY.  It kind of puts a lot of things in perspective.  All situations and struggles are temporary.  There's always more to come, no matter what is going on in any moment.

After our long conversation, I told him how glad I was that I got to talk to him like that.  He said he was so glad to talk to me too.  He told me I should come talk to him more often.  So I am going to add a stop to some of my Sunday grandparent days or other days when I go down to the lake.  What an amazing time it was to be able to listen to these stories.